denny Schools Periods & Styles book

The letters and travel notebook pages of Meyer Schapiro—one of the leading art historians of the twentieth century—published here are filled with observations and drawings that illuminate the intellectual and emotional life of a young scholar committed to tracing the deep connections of art with the totality of culture.

Schapiro’s letters to his future wife, Lillian Milgram, were written in 1926 and 1927, while he was a graduate student touring the artistic monuments of Europe and the Near East. Bearing intimate witness to this formative journey, they augment the visual and factual details he so painstakingly recorded in his notebooks with impassioned reflections on art and lively accounts of his encounters with an older generation of art historians.

Accompanying the letters and travel notebook pages—transcribed and annotated by Daniel Esterman, the Schapiros’ nephew—are Thomas Crow’s foreword, Esterman’s introduction, and an essay by Hubert Damisch.